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For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a friend - my really own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (terrific title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

Yet it was totally composed by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, kenpoguy.com and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, however it's likewise a bit recurring, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's triggers in collecting data about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading technology reporter ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.

There's also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the kind of my feline (I have no animals). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI -book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had actually sold around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, cadizpedia.wikanda.es given that rotating from putting together AI -generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The company uses its own AI tools to generate them, prawattasao.awardspace.info based on an open source big language model.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - just Janet, who created it, can order any more copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone producing one in anybody's name, including celebrities - although Mr Mashiach states there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is imaginary, created by AI, garagesale.es and created "exclusively to bring humour and delight".

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, however Mr Mashiach worries that the product is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get offered even more.

He hopes to expand his variety, creating various genres such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's created to be a light-hearted form of customer AI - selling AI -generated items to human customers.

It's also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it most likely took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We must be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually imply human developers' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which projects for AI companies to regard creators' rights.

"This is books, this is short articles, this is photos. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to find out how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian vocalists Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had actually not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not think using generative AI for innovative purposes should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people's work without permission ought to be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex includes. "AI can be really powerful but let's build it ethically and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals using its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - including the BBC - have selected to obstruct AI developers from trawling their online material for training purposes. Others have actually decided to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

The UK government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI designers to use creators' content on the internet to help establish their models, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He points out that AI can make advances in locations like defence, healthcare and logistics without the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and destroying the livelihoods of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in your home of Lords, is likewise strongly against eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of delight," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is undermining among its finest carrying out markets on the vague promise of development."

A federal government representative stated: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a useful strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to assist them license their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for best holders from AI designers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a nationwide information library including public data from a large range of sources will also be made readily available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to enhance the safety of AI with, among other things, companies in the sector required to share details of the functions of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has actually now been reversed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, however he is stated to desire the AI sector to deal with less guideline.

This comes as a variety of lawsuits versus AI companies, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been taken out by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their material from the web without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under "reasonable use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can make up reasonable usage - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it ought to be spending for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to consider, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded complimentary app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its innovation for a portion of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's existing dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weak point in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has lots of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to check out in parts because it's so long-winded.

But provided how rapidly the tech is progressing, I'm not sure how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are much better.

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